Evidence that voice disturbances might be an additional clue to making a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease was recently supported by a study conducted by a mathematician and collaborators from Intel Corp. Max Little, Ph.D., a mathematician now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., was approached by the company to use voice recordings from people with Parkinson’s to develop a simple way of detecting the condition.

Dr. Little and his colleagues found that by having people simply say an extended “aah” sound into a telephone, they could distinguish people with the disease from healthy people without it with an accuracy of nearly 99%.